STATUS REPORT
accessible through the White House website, to facilitate the transparent development and assessment of agencies' draft Open Government Plans. The Dashboard allowed the public to track the progress of agency plans during their formulation. Agency draft plans were reviewed also by components of the Executive Office of the President, in response to which agencies revised their draft plans. Outside good-government groups also evaluated agency plans. Most importantly, agencies' Open Government Plans expressly sought public participation in their development and implementation.
Many agencies' Open Government Plans—including those of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Social Security Administration, among others—have received wide acclaim for their breadth and depth. The EPA's Open Government Plan, for example, provides detailed and continually updated information about upcoming agency action and encourages public participation in EPA rulemakings, hearings, and other initiatives. DOT's ambitious five-year, two-phased Open Government Plan harnesses new technology to create an agency culture of openness with stakeholders and provides comprehensive information about the Department's accomplishments, activities, and agenda.
Other agencies' Open Government Plans also employ new technology to promote transparency and participation. The Department of Commerce, in connection with its extensive outreach effort for the 2010 decennial census, launched an interactive website at "2010census.gov" to inform the public about the census count. To build public confidence and trust, DOC's site included information about the Census in 60 languages and used rich multimedia features.
In April 2010, the Department of Energy launched its Open Energy Information, a new open-source web platform that made DOE resources about clean energy sources widely available to the public. DOE's site, "OpenEI.org," houses more than 60 clean energy resources and data sets, including maps of worldwide solar and wind potential, information on climate zones, and energy best practices. In due course, the public, and indeed the energy community globally, will be able to upload additional data to the site and download the information in accessible formats. The Energy Department plans to expand this portal to include online training and technical expert networks to promote clean energy use.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), together with the Institute of Medicine, released vast amounts of data over the past year to promote health and to aid policy decisions as part of HHS's Community Health Data Initiative. HHS's Open Government Plan aims to "help consumers and communities get more value out of the Nation's wealth of health data." These data includes local smoking rates, obesity rates, access to healthy food, hospital quality, and nursing home quality. The Community Health Data Initiative seeks to render such data more accessible for ordinary citizens thereby enabling them to make more informed health-related choices.
For another example, in July 2010 the Transportation Security Administration launched "My TSA," an application that gives citizens continuous access to information that passengers frequently request from the TSA, including a partly "crowd-sourced" feature of providing
15
